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speeding and slowing down

It happened.

After nearly nineteen years of driving violation free I was pulled over last Sunday for driving over the speed limit. I was not driving recklessly, in fact, I was driving in the middle of a group of cars on a four lane street lined with houses and businesses. I never saw the police car - I was actually stopped at a light when his lights came on, and I couldn't have told you how fast I was going (although he did). I knew I wasn't going any faster than the cars around me, but when I pulled away from the stop and consciously drove at the thirty mile an hour speed I knew that I was certainly not driving that slowly.

It wasn't the end of the world. I suppose I was due (or overdue). I've had a good run, no accidents of my causing, no traffic violations of any kind. But I'm not always the most conscious of my speed - watching the actions of others around me more than my speedometer. Needless to say, I've been watching it a bit more this week.

I've been needing to slow down in a few other areas as well - to take on a few less projects, and pay a bit more attention to those already in process. Doing this isn't always the easiest to follow through on - especially with two kids who need to eat and sleep and be taken to basketball games and Daisy Scouts. But the other night, E and I stayed up late and I worked on this laptop, on the model and the projects and the drawings I've been trying to complete. She watched me work for an hour and thoroughly enjoyed it. We dreamed big, and translated those dreams to quick three-dimensional reality and within twenty minutes of watching she was already pointing out omissions and errors in the model. I think I could probably give her another hour of instruction and her own laptop and she'd be designing cities of her own. Children are amazing, and can understand and enjoy things that we might not even think of exposing them to until we slow down a bit and let them in.

stay home day

Inservice at school meets our regular laid back Fridays. A little sleeping in, a lot of markers and paper, and a few extra baby snuggles on the agenda.

hope is sitting in my hallway

I've never been so happy to see big piles of stuff sitting in my hallway. Two big piles to be exact.

nothing in the kitchen is safe

Cleaner baking cabinet deserves a cleaner spice drawer.

a brighter corner

A little something that M brought back from his trip to Chicago.

she shoots, she scores

Too bad all the landed warm up shots don't count. Her dad gets all the credit for this. 0% comes from me - I think I can count on one hand the number of baskets I've made in my lifetime.

more bath pics? okay

bath time

Hands down, one of the best times of the day.

laundry room musings

Little by little I've been constructing our house in a 3D model - the idea is to get a working model of our current house, and start to plan out some projects that we really want to tackle this year. A lot of them seem to involve finding the time to measure, get drawings out to contractors or fabricators, get pricing, budget the work, and actually schedule the work to be done. Sometimes it's hard just to get that process started. Having a good base model to work with might just help us get our mind around the extent of some of these projects, and also allow us to put furniture and rugs, etc. in at the correct scale and make some informed decisions.
Last night I pulled out the laundry room section of the model and looked at a couple of alternatives for trimming out the new units.
Below is what we currently have - with a big blank spot under the countertop where the old single unit was, and a big blank spot above where we've removed the upper cabinet.

The next image is one way that we could trim out the side of the new stacking units - it's a little awkward and doesn't really give good access to the back of the units for servicing, etc.

I really like this next one where the whole unit is enclosed in trim and we modify the existing upper cabinet doors - shortening them and making the upper cabinet deeper - similar to the way some refrigerators are fitted out in kitchen cabinets. This is a pretty involved option, and again it doesn't give a good solution for plugging / unplugging the unit. There's just not a lot of room to pull the units straight out into the room to service.

I think the next one will be our best solution to the problem - the upper cabinet will remain the shallow depth, and we'll have a trimmed out box that surrounds the new unit that will provide a way to get easier access to the back for servicing. The upper cabinet won't be very accessible, but we tend to store our boxes with owners manuals here - for things like our cameras, appliances, so we don't have to access them too often.

We got the bid back from the electrician today, and the units should be in as well. So still a long way to go - a bit more of the laundromat in our near future. But at least in the virtual world those machines are scrubbing and drying and spinning away in their new little spot, and my laundry room doesn't smell like accumulating dirty diapers and burp rags.

fat tuesday

Our local Mardi Gras is celebrated in and around our neighborhood on the Saturday before Fat Tuesday. We live two blocks away from the boundary of closed streets / pedestrian only area, and so pretty early in the morning on that Saturday the streets fill up with cars and people wearing shiny beads. We stay home on this day because if we leave, we can't come back. And so we did some homebound things, a little of this, a little of that. Some food making, some Pirate Snap. Later that afternoon some friends rescued from our solitude and drove us to E's basketball game and invited us over for popcorn. A little tamer than our neighbors, but not a bad way to spend a cold and snowy Saturday.

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Side note: There is nothing this baby won't eat...and eat a lot of. That asparagus above - that's for tomorrow. And if you think she won't eat something as strong smelling as that...well - you should see that kid attack broccoli, cauliflower and spinach. She's an eater.

Additional note: She will not, however, be having the coffee.

tell me who do you love

For seven months now I've been quietly whispering the word "mama" into her ear, determined to hear those little syllables first from her mouth. (E's first word was "hippo" - so no one wanted to claim that one!) But no matter how I tried to sway her to the other side, her first word is decidedly in his camp.

Regardless of how you say it, I hope you had a chance to tell those that you hold dear that you loved them yesterday.

cuddly

For awhile we've had Bee and Prudence sitting in opposite corners of F's crib. Each night before I lay her down we say our good nights - "good night birdies, good night sheep, good night F, time to sleep". Then she lays down and I ask her where Bee is, where Prudence is, and she turns her body to each side and cranes her neck to see them. Then in pops the thumb and out goes the baby. Lately, as she moves around her crib more in the night, we've found her up at the end with her friends. Last night when we went to check on her before retiring for the night she was in this position - cuddled up with friends for the night, sweet as could be.

and-a-half

Somebody we know marked the day where she officially became "six-and-a-half". We celebrate this event every year with a family night out to eat at a restaurant of her choice. This year she chose Crown Candy - a place her dad and I used to go to when we were still in school but hadn't been in several years. She calls it the King's Crown (if you're familiar with the Fancy Nancy series) and they do serve up some pretty great sundaes.

So great, that someone was watching pretty keenly and wondering where her spoon was.

And then she just gave up and looked at me with a knowing glance at the antics of the "kids" on the other side of the booth. I told her there was no rush to get to be that age... six- or thirty-six-and-a-half.

looking for order amongst the chaos

So I got a bit of grief (from those who shall remain nameless!) for basking in the glory of my newly organized baking cabinet. To think that the rest of my house and my life is as organized as that one cabinet would be a big mistake. I bask in its order and loveliness as a method of avoidance of this mess that resides in my second floor laundry room. After nine years of our love / hate relationship with our combination washer and dryer - when it worked, it worked brilliantly, when it didn't it was the biggest headache to service - it finally blew up in a smoky, smelly mess a few weeks back. It's not a simple fix. We can't just go down to Home Depot and buy the newest model on sale. We're switching over to two units, but those two units have to be compact units, under counter style, with the ability to stack. It involves venting where there was no vent before, an electrician to run an additional circuit and install outlets, and a special order for the appliances themselves - only FOUR models exist that fit the bill. Two were such high end units that we would have ended up putting 5K in the room before it was all said and done. For five thousand dollars I'd gladly hire someone to come in once a week and DO my laundry.

So my baking cabinet might look blissful, but this is the current state of my laundry room:

Upper cabinet removed to accommodate the second unit. Trim removed from the base of the upper cabinets and wall. Two hooks removed from the back wall.

One missing machine - the countertop will have to be cut down in place to accommodate the stacking units, and we're in the process of determining a way to trim the whole thing out to maintain the built-in look that we like about this room.

And the old unit, sitting in the room that never gets finished because there's always some sort of thing blowing up somewhere in the house that needs to be tended to. So last Sunday M got to take the remnants from Saturday night's stomach virus fiasco to the laundromat and wash them multiple times in hot water at $3.25 a load, and I get to spend my day off tomorrow figuring out how to get a week's worth of laundry and a baby in a car seat through the 6 inches of snow on the sidewalks and into the street parked car and in and out of a laundromat when I can't set any of it down on the pavement.

Soon enough it will all be fixed, and we'll move on to the next fire - tax filing, or roof repair, or new tires on the truck... and in the meantime I'll open that baking cabinet occasionally and dream of a life as organized and orderly as those flours.

too small, too big

As we switched your closet from one set of clothes sizes to the next (courtesy of a very organized hand-me-down set of bins from her aunt!) we tried on hats for size. This one belonged to your big sister, and as I recall, she never wore it either - it was way too small from the beginning. You liked wearing it though, so we left it on you while we sorted and folded and put away. Taking out a whole set of clothes that you've outgrown is so bittersweet - you are in them and out of them in a flash and there is never enough time to snuggle you close enough to stunt this rapid growth.

Seven months old today. We had a snow day, and normally that causes a lot of headaches as schedules shift and responsibilities shift. But I put that aside this morning, and enjoyed the rest of this day, this birthday of sorts. When the time flies by as fast as those shrinking onesies, you've got to grab whatever extra moments you're given and hold them tight. And that's even easier to do when the wind and the snow is blowing outside.

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Happy birthday my sweet one.

another resolution

Continuing with the theme of our 2010 resolutions - if it bugs us, fix it - I decided to tackle the "baking cabinet" this past weekend. I buy some pretty large bags of flour and sugar and the like, and they are so heavy that when they come up and down off the shelf the bags get pretty worn and leave a dusting of flour snow on everything below, and eventually I end up dumping the contents into a gallon Ziploc bag. Then a bit later, said bag springs a leak, so I double bag it, and one zipper gets clogged with sugar granules and the other just wears out and... well you get the point. They've been lying on these shelves, stacked on top of one another, shifting and sloshing around for awhile. One morning the girls and I were eating breakfast and the door slowly swung open on its own accord, and in slow motion, the bags started slithering out of the cabinet and tumbling to the countertop and the floor below, slinky style. The cabinet bugged me. So I fixed it.

Lovely stackable containers with their nifty push down, pop up vacuum sealed lids. All the various flours are accounted for.

 

And the labels, oh, the labels. Fixing another thing that was bugging - two for the price of one. Running permanent markers on the glass bottles - every time we steamed them warm again the words ran and stained our fingers and the towels. These labels are waterproof, dishwasher proof, freezer and steamer proof. Permanent marker goes on, erases off when it needs to be changed, and starts all over again like a perfect little clean, white slate. The kind of little thing that would make me so happy on a gray day in the middle of winter, so happy, in fact, that I feel compelled to photograph the inside of my refrigerator and those little jars.

And then that little bit of winter sun shining through the multi-colored jars. Multi-colored, labeled jars.

sun spots

After an early morning basketball game yesterday and a few quick errands in the gray, chilly morning, it was nice to get back to a warm home and then SUN! It came out, reaching far into the rooms with its warming rays and bright light. Everyone grabbed a sun spot on the floor and squinted with delight at its presence.

Eight hours later, the oldest was in the center of a mess of sudden sickness and pain, with the onset of some quick attacking virus and a very sore belly. You'd never know that it was coming, looking at these photos of the afternoon before. And after a good night's rest she woke up sunny as usual, and enjoying yet another day of the sun's rays as they warm her sick day pajamas.

when left alone

The other afternoon E decided to get out all of her baby clothes and organize them by outfit, by season, by color and by gender and lay them out in a neat little row against the long wall of her room. She begged me to leave them out - which we did for a few days, but enough was enough. So now they have their own storage solution, not unlike her sister's. She's starting young...

things that make me happy

E received this book for Christmas and the other night I found her working in it after finishing another one of her chapter books. Similar to the kind of things that she does at school - writing about books that she's read - but in a fun format that I'll enjoy reading back through when she's much older and reading Dante and Salinger and Shakespeare.